Discrimination and Poverty

Shelley Correll

Cecilia Ridgeway

David Pedulla

Leaders: Shelley Correll, David Pedulla, Cecilia Ridgeway

The Poverty and Discrimination RG is charged with developing a regularized protocol for measuring the amount and extent of discrimination in labor and housing markets. It is increasingly clear that labor market discrimination, far from withering away, remains very prominent for many statuses and in many types of markets. However, because this research tradition is based on “one-off” audit studies and laboratory experiments, it is not possible to compare across studies and assess which types of discrimination are the most important or the most resistant to change. There is accordingly a need to build a standardized protocol for monitoring trends in discrimination across the various types of discrimination in play (e.g., poverty status, employment status, homelessness, economic background, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, incarceration status, citizenship, religion, disability). The twofold objective of this protocol is to make it possible to assess which types of discrimination are especially prominent and which types are growing weaker or stronger over time.

Featured Examples

Click on the active buttons for a full listing of all the important policy analysis, basic research, or journalism addressing this key issue. Also explore our working papers addressing this key issue and our affiliates with expertise in this key issue.

State of the Union 2018: Discrimination

As audit studies spread and take hold, a large body of compelling evidence on gender discrimination in hiring has developed. This evidence reveals that not all women experience the same amount of discrimination. It’s especially costly for a woman to be a parent: At the point of hiring, parenthood sharply penalizes women but not men. However,women with part-time employment histories are not penalized, whether compared with men who have part- time employment histories or women who have full-time employment histories. Gender discrimination is more likely to emerge when the applicant’s commitment to work can be called into question or when an applicant is behaving in a gender-nonconforming way.

State of the Union 2018: Gender Identification

The idea that people may not identify with traditional binary gender categories has gained acceptance in the United States, but the lack of recognition of transgender and nonbinary citizens in administrative records, identity documents, and national surveys restricts people’s ability to self-identify and limits our understanding of patterns and trends in well-being.

Polluting Black Space

Social psychologists have long demonstrated that people are stereotyped on the basis of race. Researchers have conducted extensive experimental studies on the negative stereotypes associated with Black Americans in particular. Across 4 studies, we demonstrate that the physical spaces associated with Black Americans are also subject to negative racial stereotypes. Such spaces, for example, are perceived as impoverished, crime-ridden, and dirty (Study 1). Moreover, these space-focused stereotypes can powerfully influence how connected people feel to a space (Studies 2a, 2b, and 3), how they evaluate that space (Studies 2a and 2b), and how they protect that space from harm (Study 3). Indeed, processes related to space-focused stereotypes may contribute to social problems across a range of domains—from racial disparities in wealth to the overexposure of Blacks to environmental pollution. Together, the present studies broaden the scope of traditional stereotyping research and highlight promising new directions.

Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-Citation Across Fields and Over Time

How common is self-citation in scholarly publication and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a dataset of 1.5 million research papers in the scholarly database JSTOR published between 1779-2011, we find that nearly 10% of references are self-citations by a paper's authors. We further find that over the years between 1779-2011, men cite their own papers 56% more than women do. In the last two decades of our data, men self-cite 70% more than women. Women are also more than ten percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previous work at all. Despite increased representation of women in academia, this gender gap in self-citation rates has remained stable over the last 50 years. We break down self-citation patterns by academic field and number of authors, and comment on potential mechanisms behind these observations. These findings have important implications for scholarly visibility and likely consequences for academic careers.

BACKGROUND:

Gender stereotypes in science impede supportive environments for women. Research suggests that women's perceptions of these environments are influenced by stereotype threat (ST): anxiety faced in situations where one may be evaluated using negative stereotypes. This study developed and tested ST metrics for first time use with junior faculty in academic medicine.

METHODS:

Under a 2012 National Institutes of Health Pathfinder Award, Stanford School of Medicine's Office of Diversity and Leadership, working with experienced clinicians, social scientists, and epidemiologists, developed and administered ST measures to a representative group of junior faculty.

CONCLUSIONS:

Innovative ST metrics can provide a more complete picture of academic medical center environments. While junior women faculty are susceptible to ST, they may not yet experience all of its consequences in their early careers. As such, ST metrics offer a tool for evaluating institutional initiatives to increase supportive environments for women in academic medicine.

The Effects of Sexism on American Women: The Role of Norms vs. Discrimination

We study how reported sexism in the population affects American women. Fixed-effects and TSLS estimates show that higher prevailing sexism where she was born (background sexism) and where she currently lives (residential sexism) both lower a woman's wages, labor force participation and ages of marriage and childbearing. We argue that background sexism affects outcomes through the influence of previously-encountered norms, and that estimated associations regarding specific percentiles and male versus female sexism suggest that residential sexism affects labor market outcomes through prejudice-based discrimination by men, and non-labor market outcomes through the influence of current norms of other women.

The Neighborhood Context of Latino Threat

In recent years, the size of the Latino immigrant population has swelled in communities throughout the United States. For decades, social scientists have studied how social context, particularly a minority group’s relative size, affects the sentiments of the dominant group. Using a random sample survey of five communities in suburban Chicago, the authors examine the impact of Latino population concentration on native-born white residents’ subjective perceptions of threat from Latino immigrants at two micro-level geographies: the immediate block and the surrounding blocks. After controlling for Latino population size in surrounding blocks, percentage Latino in the immediate block does not influence perceptions of threat from Latino immigrants. The effect of surrounding blocks’ population size is consistent with group threat theories for white residents: the larger the Latino population, the greater the perceived threat.

A Most Egalitarian Profession: Pharmacy and the Evolution of a Family-Friendly Occupation

Pharmacy today is a highly remunerated female-majority profession with a small gender earnings gap and low earnings dispersion. Using extensive surveys of pharmacists, as well as the US Census, American Community Surveys, and Current Population Surveys, we explore the gender earnings gap, penalty to part-time work, demographics of pharmacists relative to other college graduates, and evolution of the profession during the last half-century. Technological changes increasing substitutability among pharmacists, growth of pharmacy employment in retail chains and hospitals, and related decline of independent pharmacies reduced the penalty to part-time work and contribute to the narrow gender earnings gap in pharmacy.

The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations

Using PSID microdata over the 1980-2010, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably over this period. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution that at the middle or the bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women’s work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than say occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences.

Foreign-Born Latinos Living in Rural Areas are More Likely to Experience Health Care Discrimination: Results from Proyecto de Salud para Latinos

Health care discrimination is increasingly considered a significant barrier to accessing health services among minority populations, including Latinos. However, little is known about the role of immigration status. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between immigration status and perceived health care discrimination among Latinos living in rural areas. Interviews were conducted among 349 young-adult Latinos (ages 18 to 25) living in rural Oregon, as part of Proyecto de Salud para Latinos. Over a third of participants experienced health care discrimination (39.5 %). Discrimination was higher among foreign-born (44.9 %) rather than US-born Latinos (31.9 %). Multivariate results showed that foreign-born Latinos were significantly more likely to experience health care discrimination, even after controlling for other relevant factors (OR = 2.10, 95 % CI 1.16–3.82). This study provides evidence that health care discrimination is prevalent among young-adult Latinos living in rural areas, particularly the foreign-born. Effective approaches towards reducing discrimination in health care settings should take into consideration the need to reform our broken immigration system.